The moment I first realized that everything had changed for Facebook was right after the 2016 US presidential election with one of the first of many Zuckerbergian mea culpas. Not that first post-election post, his horribly disingenuous dodge that improbably asserted that Facebook could not have influenced the election. This, despite a Facebook political advertising sales force, now numbering probably in the hundreds, that had spent the past year claiming the contrary to every candidate with a marketing budget. No, it was Zuck’s second post, more circumspect and clearly more scripted, that described a concrete series of steps to counteract the influence he’d previously declared nonexistent. There, buried in the reassuring lingo of corporate comms-speak (“easy reporting”, “disrupting fake news economics”), lay some hidden bombs, or perhaps for the company, land mines. Not only would Facebook deign to rely on outside third-party sources, a sort of Snopes.com-ification of Facebook. It would consult with newspapers (!) on how to fact-check content itself.

To anyone (like this former Facebook employee) steeped in the company’s usual MO, this was astonishing. For the past two decades of consumer internet life, the great media intermediators had hidden behind what I’ll call the Algorithmic Pass. This was the not-altogether-wrong assertion that their companies merely optimized around user demand—providing the needy user whatever they wanted, by whatever metric—and were completely agnostic to truth, aesthetics, or political virtue. To every public clamor or brouhaha (and there were many), the answer was always, “It’s just math,” and they’d point at the roomful of geeks, replete with Nerf guns and beanbag chairs, as proof.

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Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) was the first ads targeting product manager on the Facebook Ads team, and author of the memoir Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. He wrote about the internet in Cuba in WIRED’s July issue.

More than a mere corporate cover-your-ass maneuver, the Algorithmic Pass heralded a monumental shift in how modern, media-saturated humans learned about the world. No longer would handpicked mandarins at recognized media establishments—the editors and curators of our literary and political world—anoint one or another piece of content with the always malleable imprimatur of “true” or even “good.” No. Whatever piece of content, however brilliant or vile, that received an escalating chain reaction of user engagement would receive instantaneous, worldwide distribution. Having “gone viral” became a greater trophy than appearing “above the fold” (now a ludicrous concept). Vox populi, vox culturae.

And then the 2016 election happened.

Suddenly we’re all rescinding Facebook’s Algorithmic Pass, hounding the uncharacteristically beleaguered company to take some responsibility for what appears on its blue-framed pages. What’s most ironic about the hubbub is this: people fear Facebook’s power, so they ask Facebook to take on even more power by taking a very direct hand in what appears there, rather than a very second-order mathematical one. As Facebook’s power grows and our trust erodes, we somehow overcompensate by rushing to entrust them with even more.

Contemplate this unsettling vision: Mark Zuckerberg, or more likely one of his deputies, sitting in the equivalent of the afternoon editorial meeting at The New York Times, where the day’s news—which stories will appear, and which won’t—are decided: this news source discarded as fake or spammy, this one included and effectively boosted in the newsfeed. As much as I grew to admire some of the company’s culture as an employee, I realize as much as anyone how they can (and do) descend into groupthink and biases of various flavors. Do we really want Zuck as global news editor versus a disinterested algorithm that merely optimizes toward some objective and picks the day’s news winners and losers? The editor is dead; long live the editor, only now with editor-in-chief Zuckerberg.

Oddly enough, it’s a job he and the company don’t want. “We’re a technology company, not a media company,” has been theconstantrefrain, along with invocations of the Algorithmic Pass, for engineering-centric companies like Facebook. MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS and DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT were the Facebook mantras (as immortalized on their many in-office posters), not ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT and DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS.

And it shows.

Around 2015, as Facebook’s Trending Topics product dithered in embarrassing irrelevance (a shameless rip of Twitter’s Trending feature, it appears on the right-hand side during most Facebook sessions), the company stooped to hiring humans—HUMANS!—to fix its deficient software product. Within 18 months or so, all had been fired and the human effort shuttered, but not before, in an absolute and unusual violation of Facebook’s typically ironclad OPSEC, some of them spilled the beans about how horrible working at Facebook had been, with some even suggesting they’d been pushed to bias the news. A half-trillion-dollar company armed with some of the best technical minds in the world couldn’t manage a dozen or so wet-behind-the-ears journalism grads, something the Sacramento Bee manages annually without much ado. That’s how good Facebook is at being a media company.

But if there’s anything I grew to respect while working at Facebook, it was the company’s unnatural ability to pivot in a completely new direction and iterate rapidly toward excellence there, no matter how originally foreign the territory. With the feds breathing down their neck (Facebook is testifying before Congress this week) and Zuckerberg issuing public apologies during the Jewish Day of Atonement, the company has been shaken like nothing I’ve ever seen as employee or outside observer. If the world wants Facebook as editor, they’ll sure get it, for better or worse.

What’s that mean in practice? From the company’s hints, it will involve the aforementioned third-party fact-checking services, a sort of Snopes-ification of the Facebook experience. Based on both that and user input, content will first be conspicuously flagged as false and then effectively disappeared from newsfeed distribution, as porn or other terms-of-service-violating content is now. In addition, based on its short-lived experiments in human editing around Trending Topics, Facebook will almost certainly draw up a list of acceptable news outlets of passable truthiness, boosting their distribution at the expense of second-tier (or no-tier) content producers.

There’ll be some clear downsides though.

The death-by-algorithm of the media gatekeepers meant that many new voices rose to the fore that would never have jumped through the arbitrary hoops of conventional publication. XKCD, The Oatmeal, Stratechery, Slate Star Codex, Ribbonfarm, Wait But Why—all those weird but clever bloggers or cartoonists who joked, scribbled, or illustrated their way to online fame, viral post after viral post—the new crop of those will find it very hard to hustle themselves an audience. The lone, nonconforming online genius may just be muted along with that Russian political ad farm. Your byline isn’t on Slate or The Washington Post? Too bad, lone content creator.

Which brings us to the other ironic thing about all of this: In order to preserve our political democracy, which elevates the most popular among us (though perhaps not the finest) to power, we’ll seemingly abandon a total democracy of thought, which does the same for ideas. You can judge a people by how much freedom they can tolerate without destroying themselves. It seems the power for anyone to go viral and attain a global audience, through articulate reasoning or just clickbait-y libel, was a just bit too much freedom for us to bear.

Eli Attia alleges he wasn’t the only one mistreated by the search giant.

A long-running lawsuit filed against Google by a prominent architect has just gotten much broader.

Last week, the Superior Court of California granted a motion adding racketeering charges to the civil case being pursued against Google by Eli Attia, an expert in high-rise construction. Attia claims Google stole his idea for an innovative building design method – and now he wants to prove that it does the same thing frequently.

Attia’s suit was originally filed in 2014, four years after he began discussions with Google (prior to its reorganization as Alphabet) about developing software based on a set of concepts he called Engineered Architecture. Attia has said Engineered Architecture, broadly described as a modular approach to building, would revolutionize the design and construction of large buildings. Attia developed the concepts based on insights gleaned from his high-profile architecture career, and has called them his life’s work.

Google executives including Google X cofounder Astro Teller came to share his enthusiasm, and championed developing software based on Engineered Architecture as one of the company’s “moonshots.” But Attia claims the company later used his ideas without fulfilling an agreement to pay to license them.

Attia’s suit names not just Google, but individual executives including founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It also names Flux Factory, the unit Attia’s suit alleges was spun off specifically to capitalize on his ideas.

Speaking to the San Jose Mercury News, Attia’s lawyer claims Google told Attia his project had been cancelled, “when in fact they were going full blast on it.” Flux Factory is now known as Flux, and touts itself as “the first company launched by Google X.”

Attia’s suit will now also seek to prove that his case is representative of a much broader pattern of behavior by Alphabet. According to court documents, the motion to add racketeering charges hinged on six similar incidents. Those incidents aren’t specified in the latest court proceedings, but Alphabet has faced a similar trade-secrets battle this summer over X’s Project Loon, which has already led to Loon being stripped of some patents.

The idea of racketeering charges entering the picture will surprise many who associate them with violent organized criminals. But under RICO statutes, civil racketeering suits can be brought by private litigants against organizations and individuals alleged to have engaged in ongoing misdeeds. The broader use of racketeering charges has slowly gained ground since the introduction of RICO laws in the 1960s, with some famous instances including suits against Major League Baseball and even the Los Angeles Police Department.

The Google Assistant was the star of Google I/O for the second year in a row. Now that the technology has been available for well over a year, Google is adding numerous features that will expand the AI’s reach in Google’s quest to dominate your home. In other words, expect to be talking to your phone a lot more in the coming years. Visual responses with Chromecast Getting voice answers Google Home or your phone is fine and all, but sometimes it helps to have a visual aid. Google is leveraging Chromecast to do just that. Now if you ask the…

With Samsung’s official recall of the Note7 now underway, carriers have started to lay out when their customers can expect replacement devices.

Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T and US Cellular have all confirmed they will have replacement devices available at their retail locations by Sept. 21. Samsung also says it expects to have replacements ready “no later” than that day.

In the meantime, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is advising people who purchased a Note7 prior to Sept. 15, to “immediately stop using and power down” the handset. Affected devices can be returned and exchanged at the same location where they were purchased. Read more…

Writer’s Block How much content do writers need to create in 1 month in order to survive in these American cities? Required Words Per Month by City Based on Cost of Living Select up to 10 cities to compare below. Total Required Written Words Per Month Publication Levels to Write For Select the publication level buttons below to get a more accurate breakdown of your required word count. Writing Level Distribution This pie chart will show how your time must be broken down between the different levels. Pretty much everyone in the tech industry has done this at least once…